Go Big or Go Home? Bad Advice. Better Advice: Go Niche or Go Broke.

Go Big or Go Home is some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Big successes hardly ever start out that way, and now more than ever if you try to start big you’ll probably lose your home… and then where will you go?

If you want to go BIG, there’s no better model than the bigass Hollywood studios and their bigass tentpole movies. But already the logic is flawed because hardly any of the tentpoles’ underlying properties were big right out of the gate.

There’s a reason why the biggest studio movies are remakes, reboots, sequels, and adaptations… it’s just too damn costly, risky, and most importantly ineffective these days to market an entirely new property from the ground straight up to the stratosphere of massmarket, major motion picture distribution. It’s rare to accuse Hollywood-types of being fiscally-conservative, but just as ‘we’re all marketers now’ we’re also ‘all beancounters now.’

Hollywood isn’t rebooting and remaking movies nonstop because there’s a lack of new ideas… there are zillions of unmade spec scripts circulating around town that could make perfectly good films. But they can’t go big if they don’t have a core audience, because it’s simply bad business to try and make something out of nothing. Here’s the sad truth: film is a terrible incubator for new ideas.

The solution? Well, the studios have existing brands (that they own or that they have the warchest to license), but we all share niches. Vampires and zombies are popular right now for this reason, you can’t afford Will Smith but zombies and vampires are public domain box office superstars. It’s also a reason why indie H.P Lovecraft adaptations are so popular, his stories are public domain and have a huge built-in core audience. Adaptations and marketable monsters are shortcuts, you can start with an original idea… but you shouldn’t start big and you shouldn’t expect it to go big quickly (or anytime soon).

A niche is a portal to a core audience. That core will enable you to start with a targeted base that can be galvanized into supporting your project, and once you’ve got the base you can potentially grow it into something BIG. You don’t have to, you can subsist for a long time catering solely to your core audience and that’s great… but there’s another possibility: a project that was initially geared for a specific audience could grow far beyond that into BIG… like Harry Potter or Batman. Those properties were not strategized in a corporate board room and taken out in their infancy to market BIG. They started relatively small with core audiences and then grew incrementally and later exponentially. Even Transformers had humbler beginnings than a $200M Michael Bay effectsapalooza. Batman had 50 years of marketing behind it before Tim Burton’s major motion picture adaptation took it BIG, and 70 years before Christopher Nolan made it respectable. Lord of the Rings brewed for 47 years before Peter Jackson took it BIG BIG BIG (no disrespect to Ralph Bakshi). Transformers had 23 years of marketing before Michael Bay’s re-imagining took it BIG. Sure Harry Potter was relatively young at 4 years when it got taken to the major motion picture level, but hell sometimes you win the lottery… plus JK Rowling had that property in the incubator for 7 years prior to the first book being published, so you could just as easily call it 11 years. Will the ‘Half-Blood Prince’ movie outperform the ‘Sorcerer’s Stone’ movie? I certainly hope so… Half-Blood Prince is benefiting from 19 years of incubation/marketing whereas Sorcerer’s Stone only benefited from 11. Going BIG takes longer than most marketers would like to admit. Can you imagine bringing an investor a business plan for a superhero franchise with a 70 year marketing campaign?

Of course, it’s not as simple as throwing a vampire or a wizard or a punk or a robot into your project. Studios can buy access to niches by licensing existing, credible properties… indie creators have to earn their access to niches by creating new credible properties. That takes time and it requires starting with a small core audience that will support you in the long term.

If a project has no core audience, it is not marketable. The massmarket will never champion your project, no matter how good it is. If you build a core audience and deliver the best project for them, they will champion the project. That way, if it’s not crossover-material, you’ll still have an audience to support you… and if it is crossover-material, your core will do the legwork of getting it to the next level. Then you can go big and go home.

[Cautionary notes: When thinking niche, there are two things to keep in mind. 1- it is problematic for your project to be confrontational against its own niche, this is a hurdle I personally face all the time since I’m inflammatory to a fault. From a marketer’s point of view, the best kind of niche marketing is a Robert Greenwald or Michael Moore movie where they sell to a niche that already believes what they’re saying and feels vindicated by seeing it onscreen… if it’s successful it expands to less sympathetic audiences who might welcome an intellectual debate, but Outfoxed’s core audience was people who already hated Fox News. So if you want your marketing effort to be financially successful, you’ll want to pander to your niche, not challenge it. 2- if you can organically and authentically cater to more than one niche that’s great, but it's risky. Each time you add a niche, you dilute the core. I’ve seen so many projects and marketing campaigns fail by trying to incorporate something for everyone. Find your niche and be the best for that niche, don't spread yourself thin by going too broad -- better to be the best for a small audience than to be mediocre for a huge one.]

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]